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Friday, August 04, 2017

The Easy Gun - E.M. Parsons

THE EASY GUN is one of those novels that comes out of
nowhere and takes you by surprise. Published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1970 and
promptly forgotten, it’s about 95% of a great Western. As for the unfortunate
other 5% . . . well, more about that later.

The story begins in El Paso with Big John Easy, a brawling gambler/con
man/outlaw who’s trying to go straight because he knows he’s set a bad example
for his 20-year-old son, also named John but known as Little Easy. The name is
ironic, because Little Easy is a massive six-and-a-half foot tall bruiser, even
bigger and tougher than Big John.

A dispute with a cattle buyer/gunfighter known as Long Gone Magoffin (this book
is full of great character names) leaves Big John dead and Little Easy on the
trail of the killer. Little Easy doesn’t know Magoffin’s name, but he knows the
man he’s after carries a gun with a fancy silver decoration on its black grips.
The trail leads to Ellsworth, Kansas, where Magoffin works for the villainous
Porter Jessup, a bizarre character who’s been in a wheelchair all his life
because of his crippled legs, but that doesn’t stop him from being truly evil
and establishing a criminal empire in Ellsworth, aided by his mute, giant,
former prizefighter henchman Burgoo.

If you’re worried that I’m giving away too much of the plot, all this happens
very quickly, and anyway, the real appeal of THE EASY GUN is the way Parsons
takes a whole heap of Western stereotypes (there’s even a crusading newspaper
editor who happens to be a blond, beautiful young woman) and turns most of them
upside down. Hardly anybody turns out to be exactly what you’d expect them to
be, although the plot plays out in a fairly predictable fashion, up to a point.
The writing is very good for the most part, leading up to a violent, epic
climax.

And that’s where THE EASY GUN drops the ball. Parsons rushes through the
ending, devoting only a few paragraphs to the apocalyptic battle that should
have been much more than it is. The last few pages of the book don’t work at
all, as far as I’m concerned. Earlier, Parsons had played very fast and loose
with the history and geography of Texas, which bothered me, but I would have
been willing to overlook that because I was really enjoying his style and
characters. That ending, though . . . I just can’t see it.

E.M. Parsons was best known as a TV writer, turning out scripts for various
Western and detective series in the Fifties and Sixties. As far as I can tell,
he published only three novels, all Westerns: TEXAS HELLER, from Dell in 1959;
FARGO, from Gold Medal in 1968; and THE EASY GUN, also from Gold Medal in 1970,
the same year he passed away. I have copies of the other two but haven’t read
them yet. I will, based on all the things I liked about THE EASY GUN. Maybe
I’ll like the endings better in the others. And it’s certainly possible
somebody else might think the ending of THE EASY GUN is just fine. Your
mileage, as the saying goes, may vary.

4 comments:

A wonderful book which has long been one of my all-time favorites. On my website, I actually list it as one of my favorite top fifty westerns. I've read TEXAS HELLER by the same author and have FARGO on my reading pile, but certainly TEXAS HELLER never even came close to the originality and power of THE EASY GUN.